The Kings Fair

For a few weeks each year, an empty meadow outside Belhaven becomes a city.

Merchants arrive from across the kingdom. Knights compete beneath crowded galleries. Musicians, pilgrims, craftsmen, nobles, thieves, servants, and travelers fill streets made of canvas and timber. Thousands come to buy, sell, celebrate—and disappear again before autumn.

Sir Alaric and Mira arrive expecting nothing more than a few peaceful days among the crowds.

Then a man vanishes.

Martin Hale, steward to one of the fair’s wealthiest merchants, disappears in the middle of his work. His ledger lies open upon a table, an entry abandoned halfway through a line. His belongings remain behind. There is no blood, no struggle, and no witness who can say where he went.

At first, there may be no crime at all.

But Martin had been asking questions before he disappeared.

Questions about records that did not agree. Orders issued under familiar names. Payments no one could fully explain. And a household seal that may have been used for purposes its owner never authorized.

As Alaric and Mira search the fair, the crowded celebration becomes a maze of conflicting stories. Merchants accuse rivals. Servants conceal what they know. Old disputes surface beneath new bargains, and every rumor spreads faster than the truth can follow.

Soon Alaric realizes that in a place where identities are temporary, records change hands daily, and thousands of strangers will soon scatter along every road in the kingdom, discovering what happened may not be enough.

He must discover which parts of the story were designed to be believed.

The King’s Fair is the eighth book in The Alaric Investigations, a historical mystery of vanished men, borrowed identities, disputed records, old ambitions, and the dangerous freedom of a place where everyone expects to leave before their secrets catch up with them.